IT organizations are increasingly choosing to reduce their up-front investments in IT infrastructure by deploying their applications into cloud environments. These environments offer on-demand availability of data storage and computing power that organizations need to handle high volumes of data and fluctuating or growing demand for application access and services.

Today, there are three common deployment models for cloud computing services:

Private Cloud – Private cloud infrastructure is operated solely for a single organization. It can be managed internally or by a third party. Private cloud systems can provide flexible storage capacity and computing power for different areas of business, but they lack the element of hands-off management that makes cloud computing an attractive economic model for leveraging IT infrastructure.

Public Cloud – Public cloud services are delivered over a network that is open for public use. In this model, the IT infrastructure is owned by a private company (Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft or Oracle are popular providers) and members of the public can purchase or lease data storage or computing capacity as needed.

Hybrid Cloud – Hybrid cloud environments are comprised of a combination of public and private cloud services from different providers. Organizations may want to keep some data on private cloud servers for privacy and security reasons, while leveraging public cloud applications at a lower price point for less sensitive information. When these public and private environments are interconnected, the result is a hybrid cloud environment.

As IT organizations increasingly buy into the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business model and deploy more applications into the cloud, there is an increased need for structured cloud management processes that enable organizations to monitor their cloud-based applications for compliance and security, facilitate workflow automation and drive timely decision-making and cost savings.